AfricaIs aCountry

People's Culture

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

People's Culture

By
Sean Jacobs

[vodpod id=Video.3322857&w=450&h=370&fv=]

Priceless footage of 1980s Community Arts Project in Durban, which, according to one of the founders, artist Bruno Brincat, was “… an idealistic arts project that was ahead of its time and got nixed by the apartheid authorities.”

“… During the making of this video the CAW was in its fourth year and beginning to take shape. Apart from hosting a variety of functions, it offered 20 classes and had 400 members. It had initiated classes to train teachers with a view of setting up satellite township projects. The video was made to help raise funds (primarily from America). Ironically, when the Durban City Council saw the video they withdrew the building and the project collapsed. We had already relocated three times in as many years and were unable to find another suitable location. The video was made with the assistance of the University of Natal and in particular Costa Criticos.”

[Thanks to Bruno Brincat; h/t Duke Bantu X ]

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.